Website Design Latest Grid Trends

Grids give structure and confidence to your eCommerce website design and, when used correctly, will give a subtle underlying organisation that is very pleasing to the eye. Of course this can be achieved without the use of a grid but for ease its best to bite the bullet and create one. Remember a grid is there to guide not to restrict, you are allowed to break it from time to time, just make sure its worth is.

Why Should I Use A Grid For My eCommerce Website?

The Current Standard:

960px – The most currently used and popular grid in the world of website design and ecommerce solutions is the 960px grid. Why 960? Well for a few reasons, firstly it is the most versatile grid system that can fit on a 1024px resolution screen. For people who don't know us webdesigners try and keep the width of their site small so they can fit on 1024px so the “majority" of users can see the full website on their screens with room for background.

Secondly the 960px grid can be cut up into many different arrangements of columns (Large areas for content) with gutters (Space between columns), the most popular being 12 and 16 columns. These layouts provide lots of different divisions of content, images and media on the website or ecommerce solution.

The New Standard:

1140px – New to the stage of website design is the up and coming 1140px grid system. Now that computers are being made with much larger resolution screens than the old standard 1024px, this has brought up the average computer screen resolution to 1280px. This equates to more room to play with for ecommerce websites.

Just like before this grid system can still be broken up into 12 and 16 columns but now each one of these columns is much larger providing lots more space for larger images and more text. Perfect for any ecommerce solution or ecommerce websites.

What About Tablets And Phones?

The best part of this 1140px grid system is it can be implemented into a liquid grid. But what's that? Well liquid grids automatically calculate the width of the screen they are being displayed on and shuffle all of the websites media, text and images to fit perfectly. So end result is a website that is fully functional, fits and looks perfect regardless of what its being viewed on.